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Ubuntu's Firefox May Gain JPEG 2000 Support

Phoronix: Ubuntu's Firefox May Gain JPEG 2000 Support

JPEG 2000, the image file format that has been around for nearly a decade and offers better compression performance and greater flexibility in the code-stream that can allow for higher quality photographs compared to a traditional JPEG, may get a boost on the Linux desktop. JPEG 2000 hasn't seen much adoption in large part because of the lack of web browsers that natively support this JP2 ISO standard, including Firefox...

I can honestly say that this isn't exactly news that gets my heart running a little faster, it simply isn't important enough to me.
And if it is patent-encumbered (why else would Mozilla be sued if they implemented support for it in FF?), I'm only leaning more towards saying "thanks, but no thanks", especially since it isn't THAT greatly used.

obligatory "screw you pavlov" post

AFAIK, Konqueror supports everything KDE itself does - which includes JPEG2k and MNG.

Last time I tried the GIMP plugin for MNG it was half-finished and pretty crap. The part I'm more interested in is JNG (JPEG compression + alpha transparency).

This APNG format is complete and utter garbage. I haven't seen a single app that actually supports reading it besides Firefox, never mind creating them. That makes it about as "Portable" as VML.
It only exists at all because one particular Mozilla developer is an awful troll, and his plan to kill off MNG in Mozilla - by setting impossibly tight library size requirements - backfired spectacularly; the MNG devs almost managed it before the rug was pulled out from under them. Go check out bug 18574 on bugzilla for the complete circus. It's a glimpse into the infantile politics that go on in Mozilla's inner circles.

The story of the MNG limbo in Mozilla is indeed a very sad one. It is notable that converting the animated GIFs which Firefox ships (for throbbers etc.) to MNG would actually reduce its size even if you count the additional code for MNG support.

Regarding JPEG 2000, it has some advantages over JPEG, eg. alpha transparency. The Wikipeda article has all details.

Last time I tried the GIMP plugin for MNG it was half-finished and pretty crap. The part I'm more interested in is JNG (JPEG compression + alpha transparency).

JPEG 2000 also supports transparency. And, unlike JNG, it is actually commonly used (and is much more efficient to boot).

Originally Posted by Ant P.

This APNG format is complete and utter garbage. I haven't seen a single app that actually supports reading it besides Firefox, never mind creating them. That makes it about as "Portable" as VML.

There are already plenty of applications that can read and write such files, including a site that makes construction of such files quite easy. All the modern browsers support the format (and none of them support MNG). There is already a patch to add support to GTK+. I have seen the format pop up more and more lately, though, of course, only on sites with few IE users (such as userstyles.org). There is a clear need for something like APNG, which fulfils several needs that GIF fails to meet. Since APNG, unlike MNG, is actually supported, I expect APNG slowly to overtake GIF in the coming years. So, both your premiss that only Firefox supports the format and your conclusion that APNG isnít portable are demonstrably false. I understand that you wish MNG were supported, but please donít spread uninformed falsehoods.

Great! Now all they need is a patch to make it honor $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, a patch to make it work with gnome-globalmenu, and a patch to make it work with gnome keyring and somebody might mistake it for a native Ubuntu application

AFAIK, Konqueror supports everything KDE itself does - which includes JPEG2k and MNG.

Last time I tried the GIMP plugin for MNG it was half-finished and pretty crap. The part I'm more interested in is JNG (JPEG compression + alpha transparency).

This APNG format is complete and utter garbage. I haven't seen a single app that actually supports reading it besides Firefox, never mind creating them. That makes it about as "Portable" as VML.
It only exists at all because one particular Mozilla developer is an awful troll, and his plan to kill off MNG in Mozilla - by setting impossibly tight library size requirements - backfired spectacularly; the MNG devs almost managed it before the rug was pulled out from under them. Go check out bug 18574 on bugzilla for the complete circus. It's a glimpse into the infantile politics that go on in Mozilla's inner circles.

I'm probably going to regret this, but...

Even if Firefox is the only browser that supports APNG (there's an add-on for making them too, by the way), it's still more than the userbase of MNG-supporting browsers, and people have tried to add APNG support to GIMP, but the developers are staunchly against it in favor of MNG (although they don't support MNG on all platforms, either).

What's the advantage of MNG from a practical standpoint, anyway? (and I really, really just mean this as an honest technical question. I've read up on the two formats in the past but could never really make heads or tails of the situation) The whole rationale behind APNG was that the first frame can still be decoded by programs that don't support it as long as they can decode PNGs.